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I am intrigued by aesthetic proportions, most notably the Golden Section. (Blame a second year undergraduate course on medieval and modern structures and living with somebody else’s writing a paper on the appearance of the Fibonacci sequence / golden ratio in nature and art!) When I am writing music I don’t consciously go out of my way to adhere to any particular proportions, but once a piece I am working on feels right in its span, scale and form, I do — merely out of interest — like to perform a few quick calculations to see what lies at a couple of critical moments. This evening, with the shape of my 6 minute Lenten motet now finally in place, I did the sums: the Golden Section just happens to fall exactly upon the great turning point of the piece; the start of the redemptive moment of hope. Not only this, but the prior petitions against oblivion begin at the exact half-way point in the motet. Sheer fluke! — but it does make one wonder what it is that the subconscious is up to, and whether and how we might feel or sense innately such proportions. A couple of minutes worth of notes need yet to be lived with and dwelt upon before it is finished, to determine whether or not they are right — and in a couple of passages have yet to be found prior to that settling process; but I feel now that the worst is over and that the piece will be completed before too much longer.

Unlike the laissez faire approach to the artistic content of my work, when it comes to the design and layout of the recent print material I have produced, I have specifically calculated the proportions for certain elements on the page. In the case of the new poetry volume I am writing at present (a single, extended poem), I am — inspired by the fine press printer who undertook my first — laying it out for print on pages based on the Golden proportion with page margin’s similarly devised. The actual poem will remain at the whim of my feeling in its proportions. Overarching form is a major part of this poem, but I shall feel for it, as the poem evolves, rather than reach for the calculator.

My University of Exeter colleague and collaborator, Tim Kendall, and I are at present gearing up to submit the completed typescript of the first volume of our scholarly, variorum edition of Ivor Gurney’s complete poetical works to the publisher. By Easter it should be in the hands of our editor at the Oxford University Press and hopefully making its slow bur steadfast way to print. The subsequent two volumes should follow within a matter of a few months, having long been on the cusp of readiness. The first volume is the knottiest, but we are getting there, and the end is within sight.

This week I have mopped up the last few sources that have been niggling at my mind; manuscript repositories outside of the main Gurney collection that I have wanted to sift for references to, and ms. copies of, Gurney’s poetry, not to mention the possibility of finding any more otherwise unknown poems. To my great joy, there were four new poems to be had! A light verse of late 1915/early 1916, and three from the autumn of 1922. Alongside two fragments found last week, these last additions mean that the span of known, extant poems — approaching 1,800 in number — is now complete. However: I know of poems and indeed several notebooks/collections that are either lost entirely or merely squirrelled away, forgotten, not known for what they are, or preserved in private, closely guarded sanctuaries. So please, if you have, or know of, even the slightest fragment in Gurney’s hand, please speak now or forever hold your peace!

I hope that, now or in the future, some of Gurney’s lost works will surface, both musical and poetic, hoping beyond hope that these works have not been destroyed — although I know that many potentially important works have been lost irrevocably. Our poetry edition will be as complete as it can be, and the reader will at last be able to see the true picture of Gurney the poet, with a staggering thousand poems appearing in print for the first time. Some poems will fall and be passed over, for there is in his output work that is not ‘Great’ poetry, although it is of interest, biographically. But I can promise you that there is a new strength coming, particularly in the largely overlooked late work: revelations of poetic means and purpose. There isn’t *too* much longer to wait! It will be off our desks soon.

The setting to music of a poet’s hard-wrought text is an act of butchery. It is an appropriation of a work of art which can lift a poem off the page and bring it to life; it can bring a poem to an audience who would likely never have otherwise encountered it; and it can also rile a poet, who sees his the result of his labours as a piece of art ‘intire in itself’; a work that was the poet’s ultimate goal and vision.

I am reminded of this today as I work through some of the secondary correspondence in the Gurney archive. In 1925 Gurney composed a setting of Robert Bridges’s ‘Johannes Milton Senex’, ‘Since I believe in God the Father Almighty’, which Gurney set as a ‘motett’ for double choir. It is an extraordinary setting, and, after I brought it out of the archive and to performance in 2012, it has now been recorded twice for CD, by Gloucester Cathedral Choir and The Sixteen, and broadcast at twice on Radio 3, sung by the BBC Singers.

Robert Bridges, on being sent a copy of the motett in July 1925, shortly after its writing, showed it to Henry Ley — then organist of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford — who thought it interesting, suggesting that he might try it through [with the choir] if copies could be made. Bridges, however, was more circumspect about giving an opinion following any hearing of the work, stating that

‘I am not at all sympathetic with the way in which modern musicians treat words. They aim at effects which I do not desire. When they are successful I am pleased enough, but I do find their success very rare. I hope this may be one of them and that it will be possible to let Ley try it with his choir next term.’

Whether the work was ever tried through we cannot tell, although we know that a copy was made and reproduced, one such copy in Marion Scott’s hand being the only source for the motett now extant.

Nor was Bridges alone. A. E. Housman, one of the most-set poets in the English language, while not disallowing the use of his words, resented the corruption that composers could impose upon his work. The most famous case is that of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Housman was livid that RVW had had the audacity to cut two stanzas from ‘Is my team ploughing’ in his song cycle On Wenlock Edge. Reportedly, W. B. Yeats, heard a large group of boy scouts singing a setting of his ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ that so went against the vision and intention of his poem that he employed a musical agent to vet any future settings. Peter Warlock fell foul of that censor in his Yeats cycle, The Curlew, having to fight to allow his settings past Yeats and his agent for publication under the Carnegie British Composers scheme.

The poetry selected for setting is a very personal thing to a composer, but it is, in my opinion, not merely a matter of subjectivity. Not all poems are suitable for setting. I have a number of times been asked to suggest some Ivor Gurney poems for musical setting, and it is a task that I find quite difficult — not merely because of the subjectivity of the matter. Quite a lot of Gurney’s poetry contains so much innate music in its language and sound that it seems to preclude its setting. It needs no further music.

As one who has dabbled in both poetry and composition, as well as gaining some insight (I think) into the separation between Gurney’s arts, I have become more sensitive to the matter of musical setting of poetry. My role as an academic editor of poetry heightens the tensions at play. In this latter, I strive always to represent as truly as possible the poet’s intentions. The text is everything; it is the apogee of a poem, and the poet’s manuscript must be the last word on every aspect from punctuation to capitalisation of words, never mind the words themselves. These details matter immensely.

In my recent composings, in the writing of the War Passion that is to receive its première in just over two weeks’ time, these tensions came to a head. On the one hand I was interrogating manuscripts of poems by Rosenberg to get to his original intentions where the published poem has been corrupted from its first, posthumous publication (see this blog-post). Likewise, I sought out the corrected text of Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’, which was similarly corrupted. Conversely, and much against my academic judgement, I also edited a few poems, for which I feel much guilt and underwent some very serious soul-searching. The edits were made for purely dramatic purposes. I have appropriated a work of art — several, in fact — and turned them to new use, which goes against the pains that the poets went through to get those poems right. I left out a short stanza from ‘Into Battle’ — a poem which I also broke up across the span of the first movement; I made such selections from Edmund Blunden’s ‘Third Ypres’ as might be akin to roasting a whole chicken and then taking only a small bite from a leg, a bit from one of the breasts, and one of the oysters from the underside, before discarding the rest. In Sassoon’s ‘Christ and the Soldier’ I omitted several words, and also took the decision to represent one of the stanzas in wholly musical terms, depicting in musical sound what was described in the stanza. The words omitted from this were those descriptors and attributions that are un-neccesary when the words are being spoken or sung by an assigned character: ‘he groaned’, ‘he said’, and rhetorical statements that one can, I think, make out in the music, such as the closing line, ‘The battle boomed, and no reply came back’. Such butcheries still play on my conscience — although I did seek express permission from Blunden’s daughters to be so selective about the passages chosen from ‘Third Ypres’. They go against the grain, and I feel immensely guilty that I have appropriated the words of these poets, sometimes with great selectivity, and turned them to my own devices. I can only apologise to those poets whose work I have butchered and appropriated — although I hope the Rosenberg at least will be glad at having had his text restored.

Whether butchered or restored, there still remains the question of whether the poets will have balked at the way I have used their poems in expressive, musical terms, or will I have used effects, as Bridges puts it, which the poets would not desire or have imagined? We cannot tell. All I do know is that it was the poetry, and my strength of feeling for the poems that led me to write the settings I have. The music always started with the words, with vocal lines emerging directly out of them before textures suggested themselves around those vocal lines. It is the way I feel the poetry, and the passion that I feel in my reading of them. Whether they would pass the musical censor is impossible to say (I suspect it likely that it would not!), but it is what I felt, and I hope that might have sufficient validity to somehow overcome the great sense of guilt and betrayal I feel on the poets’ behalves. In the form of the libretto I created, and in the music I composed, I have created a new work, a new whole, a new vision, which I think of as being very much my own. But in that I am deeply indebted to the ten poets whose words I have taken and to which I have given voice, without whom the piece would never have come into being. Their art and power gave me the thoughts to create anew. So all art can feed us, and future generations, whether as reader, listener, or as a creative artist who wishes to build on and give their own personal response to the work of others. It is not that one is seeking to improve upon that work. It is, I hope, more flattering than that; that they have created a piece of work that speaks so powerfully to another that they want to express that power, passion and meaning in the way they know how.

[Letter from Robert Bridges to Marion Scott is in the Gurney Archive, Gloucestershire Archives, ref. D10500/8/2/2/3.]

This last few days, our one year old daughter has been waking early. It might be easy to curse and rue the lost hour in bed that we have been achieving quite reliably over the winter, but I have started to think that it is merely the season catching up with her. Time will, in a couple of weeks, catch up with both of them, as the clocks ‘Spring forward’ an hour to ‘darken our mornings’ and deny all that precious hour of sleep as we enter British Summer Time.

Whilst many will while away a happy few hours in a couple of weeks berating the loss of the hour, there is only one thing to blame: our tyrannical observance of time; our modern culture’s endeavours to adhere to, and account for, the minutest of horological increments, without any concession to the fundamental cycles that govern our planet, and the lives of every other creature that lives upon it. Our little girl is quite right: the sun is rising earlier, and so would we, if we weren’t regimented and controlled by our 9-5 work routines, post sunset television addictions or other such observances. We defy the world around us. We work the same length of day in winter as we do in summer; we seek to keep the same hours come what may. Why shouldn’t jobs and other such commitments begin at the second or third hour after sunrise, and finish at a similar fixed period before sunset? In summer we might counter the long days with a midday siesta period, as they do elsewhere in the world. Winter days would be less productive, but would it be that much so, and does it matter if they are? The summer would surely make up for it. In this misguidedly materialistic age in which money is the driver of everything, I doubt whether this seasonal flexibility would ever be conisdered seriously. However, there is one thing I don’t think can be denied: we in the western world need a serious dose of Rewilding.

The return of these thoughts (for they are thoughts I return to often) has brought back to me a poem I wrote a few years ago, which was published in my first short collection, Fulcrum. Indulge me if you will, or simply look away now, if you haven’t already.

Plain Sight

The deceit of Time creeps unceasing
in a myopia of tyrannical exaction,
contrivance of containment,
regulation of increments
in immeasurable microscopia
— an opiate of division, all-accounted;
tungsten dawns deluding,
denuding the seasons of defining
night; humdrum extraneity
of light, enlightenment, progress,
polluting, and masking far stars;
fixated and feinted by the day’s
diminutions in glazed isolation,
submerged in hermitic continuation;
TV-attuned, switched to remote
inoperation; inured of being,
cocooned in life’s birth-canal
to obscurity (or eternity?),
pushing, yet rising
rarely to ripple life’s surface
in a stasis of feigned living
in filmic fallacy.
— We are lost in the moments’ minutiae.

What do you see as you stand and gaze?
Our eyes and ears are gills
of chance and nurture
that filter the tide of vision
that bears upon us,
clouding clarity beyond our being.

Lift up your head!
Open the minding gills and drink
of sight, sound and thought!
Hark — the robin’s song from tree-height
shatters, cleaves the realms of time, earth,
sky, and the darkling roar of eternity’s
din breaks upon me, the world’s populace
— past, present, future — clamorous —
a billion lone voices in vast tremendous
tumult of sound, surging, searching,
piercing the air as a winded spear,
which crescents beneath the cover of cloud,
and cuts with its trail through the canopy’s
shroud, felling great trunks of shadow,
revealing a thousand stars and suns,
— then breaks and plunges
as darted gannets from sea-stacks
deep into earth’s swell
to gather the writhing threads of ages,
emerging to weave a weft of tales and time
through the warp of the present, revealing
the secrets of bird, beast and land until
now held fast in the scented breaths of earth. . .

As one who has spent, and continues to spend, many many hours of my life transcribing and editing works both literary and musical from manuscript for publication, I have developed an absolutist — some might say obsessive — need to be true to an artist’s scrawl; the words or notes they write; the definition and placing of every item of punctuation or articulation. An artist’s manuscript is the most exacting source we have of their intentions, and any representation of a work must be true to the authorial sources available to us.

At present, my time is spent unpicking the poetry of Ivor Gurney — or as much as I am able in the midst of my current teaching commitments (a baptism of fire). However, in the midst of this, I am at present trying to complete the last minutes of music for my War Passion — a chamber oratorio that is to be premièred at the Three Choirs Festival in July, and my absolutist need for accuracy has spilt over into that task, demanding textual accuracy in the poetry I am using. (Some might argue that this mindset is at odds with the very act of setting a poem to music — a brutal act of artistic butchery — particularly so given my occasionally liberal way with the poetry I am using. But that is for another day.)

In a recent Oxford University Press (OUP) sale I ordered a book that I have had my eye on for a while: Vivien Noakes’s authoritative last word on the work of Isaac Rosenberg, in her ‘21st Century Oxford Authors’ edition of his poetry, plays and selected prose and letters. This edition in some respects supersedes her Oxford English Texts (OET) edition, drawing upon manuscript material for Rosenberg’s poetry that only came to light after the OET. I was fascinated to see one poem in particular in that edition; a poem that I have used in my War Passion, ‘The Tower of Skulls’ (see my blog-post about this setting, posted in April 2015).

At the time of the OET edition, which I have on my shelves, the whereabouts of the manuscript for ‘The Tower of Skulls’ was unknown, so that edition relied upon the 1937 published text. Having learned that this manuscript was one of those that had come to light subsequent to that edition, I sought it out on the extraordinary and invaluable resource that is Oxford University’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive. The manuscript threw up a few questions, the poem evidently having been doctored a little upon its first publication. A repetition of text had been ironed out: ‘jargoning on’ should have been ‘jargoning on and on’, so this required some slight reworking of the setting I had, by June 2015, already completed.

There was one mightily intriguing change which also required some slight adjustment — although I was in a little doubt about my reading. I have become quite adept at reading handwriting on manuscripts; but even so, there was just a niggle of doubt. I had sufficient confidence in my reading to again rework the setting, but I wanted confirmation from Vivien Noakes. The book arrived this morning, and I turned immediately to the poem, only to be disappointed: the reading given — although correcting the repeated ‘on and on’ — did not reflect my own reading of the manuscript.

The passage in question is the closing stanza of the poem. In its published form it reads:

When aged flesh looks down on tender brood;
For he knows between his thin ribs’ walls
The giant universe, the interminable
Panorama — synods, myths and creeds,
He knows his dust is fire and seed.

However, in the manuscript, I read the second line as: ‘For he knows between his thin ribs walk / The giant universe […]’. It is a curious thing. Knowing those great vistas of possibility within one’s “thin ribs’ walls” is perhaps more likely; but might they also be said to walk there? Or is there an apostrophe missing after ribs in the manuscript, added in the published version, suggesting that it is within the walk of his ribs — within the locus of his being — that those vistas are to be found? Rosenberg’s locating the walk ‘between’ rather than ‘within’ suggests that the former reading to be the more probable: the vistas figuratively walk there, between his ribs.

Given that Noakes makes no concession toward my reading of the poem, I have again returned to Rosenberg’s manuscript, throwing aside my seminar planning for a few moments. Returning to it afresh, I am yet more convinced that it is indeed ‘walk’ that Rosenberg wrote, and so my setting of the poem shall remain thus. I have posted below the images of the manuscript, so that you might make up your own mind.

Detail of the line in question:

Compare the ‘k’ of walk with the surround ‘s’s at the end of words, and also compare that last ‘k’ with the below detail from the same manuscript — the word ‘stark’:

You might pity the afflicted who are so concerned with the exact representation of a poet’s or composer’s work from their manuscript, but I hope you might agree: sometimes it is worth being pedantic about these things. The manuscript and wider authorial sources must have precedence and must be preserved. It also serves as a warning for both editors such as myself and users of published material; warnings of care and of our fallibility, and that, even though it might be in print several times over, Trust Nothing!! Even a fine, exhaustive and extraordinarily knowledgeable editor such as the late Vivien Noakes can miss something.

Today I visited John Grice at the Evergreen Press in order to confirm the layout of the title page and other final details prior to the printing of my short poetry collection, Fulcrum, which is to be published on 1 June. I had visited the Press once before, in order to discuss what might be possible in the printing of my little book – a visit that was relished for the excitement of seeing the machinery, metal type and other trappings of one of the artisan Fine Presses whose work I have long admired. This time, however, there was the excitement of seeing some of my own work fully set in metal type, in readiness for the printing of the volume. In this digital age, where computers and desktop printers make print such a ready commodity, the effect of seeing one’s work in such a concrete form as metal type is quite magical, and indeed moving. So it was today, when I was confronted with 30 pages of my book fully set in gleaming type; three years of musings and writings cast in metal. Type is a beautiful thing, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photographs of this stage of the book’s making.

The bound blocks of set type, ready for locking up and printing. The five blocks of type at the near end of the row closest to the camera, and the farthest two blocks of the next row, constitute the longest poem in the book, ‘Lux Mundi’. There follows the verse, ‘The Allotted Grave’, and a free sonnet, ‘Sacrament’.

The opening of the poem ‘Plain Sight’

‘Rain-song’ (opening)

‘Relic of Hope’ and ‘Remembrance?’

As you can see, metal type is quite beautiful and seductive — as are the machines that translate their form into the printed page:

To get to the press I walk along the Stroudwater Navigation, which is a far more pleasant than the road, to say the least:

This week has seen a great landmark for me: the completion and submission to the printer of the copy for the book that will stand as the first formal mile-stone in my original creative work: a short collection of poetry titled Fulcrum.

The title of the collection has a two-fold intention, reflecting both some of the key subject matter considered within the volume and also the fact that this is a pivotal point in the balancing of my work, with a desire to put greater emphasis on my own original creative ideas, musical and poetic, than on the editing and commentary of/on the works of others, which labours have for more than ten years dominated all that I am. I first wrote of these intentions in a blog post of late December 2012, The Name and Nature of the Poet, and so it is an enormously pleasing moment to have reached the point of completing my first book (although in poetry publishing terms it is only a ‘pamphlet’).

The collection consists of thirteen poems, or rather two bookending poems between which are set eleven that are the meat of the book. It is being hand printed by John Grice at the Evergreen Press, Gloucestershire, and will be a beautiful thing. I have taken great care to select, with John’s advice and assistance, papers, colours and typefaces, and have also designed and executed the illustrative material for the book, so I hope will be a worthwhile volume if only as an object of some beauty, irrespective of the content.

I am publishing the volume by subscription in a limited edition of 100 copies, and at £15 a copy it is a very real bargain. If you would like to order a copy prior to its formal publication on 1 June 2014, please do get in touch – details given below.